Its been a while since my last entry. My guests have left and the folks/Pip are in England, so I’ve been cleaning the house and looking after two sets of dogs. I’m getting a bit fed up as my house seems to be falling apart – the bath is leaking and we have to take a false wall down to fix it, the freezer door broke off, Mum thought the washing machine was broken but it seems OK now, I thought the sewers were backed up again, but it turned out to be mouldy goats cheese stinking in the fridge, my sink got blocked up with scrambled egg, so I had to get a load of bleach down there, and Kev bust a lamp – so that’s the third lamp now!

I found that the Xbox filesystem has a 42 character limit, the stupid thing is that it will abort an FTP transaction because of it. So I think I’ll have to get a wireless gaming adaptor for it and stream MP3’s via NFS/Samba from the fileserver to XBMC. Which is probably best anyway as I must have 150Gb of MP3’s by now – more than the 80Gb HDD in the Xbox.

I’ve been fixing everyone’s computers lately, had to reinstall Win98SE and setup a modem for a friend, then fix DialupNetworking for his Australian neighbour (very fanciful, but married) and was going to go over today to fix someone’s non-booting PC, but it seems to have been the power cord loosened! I’m cleaning ready for Kev’n’Carly coming over on Thursday, gotta drop my car over to be fixed Wednesday night too.

Bloody busy day today. My uncle came over to help out with the door frame for the back of the shell and my aunt is going to help Mum make me some curtains for the lounge. Dad, Ray & I got the door mounted, which looks lovely, we’ve just got to cement around it and stain it. We did some little tidying jobs like taking the broken shutter off the back window, putting up my washing line, getting the broken roof tile out of the guttering, and I’ve started to sand the shutters from the front of the shell, as it seems the windows are fine.

I’ve been playing with the Linux applications extracxt-xiso and gXiso tonight. extract-xiso can create the proprietary Xbox ISO files from a directory of files, such as those FTP’ed from the Xbox hard disk. gXiso is a GUI for extracting that xiso back to files. So the ~30Gb worth of backed-up Xbox files are now being converted back to xiso’s for burning to DVD-R in case of hard disk failure. I just upgraded Daffyd to the 2.